Mexico shale boom outlook dims as U.S. drillers struggle at home

Workers prepare drilling pipe on a Pemex deep sea platform. Because Mexican deep-water and shale projects are riskier and more costly, plummeting crude prices make near-shore opportunities more attractive to companies looking to move into Mexico.

Photo: Bloomberg News file photo

Mexico is getting ready to welcome the U.S. shale revolution onto its soil after 75 years of state monopoly. The timing couldn’t be worse.

As a flood of supplies from Texas to North Dakota sends oil into a nosedive, U.S. producers are reducing investment budgets for 2015. The cuts dim the chances they’ll take their fracking and horizontal drilling capabilities down south anytime soon.

After changing the constitution last year to allow foreign oil investment into its territory, Mexico is having to adjust, too. Regulators are considering reworking and potentially delaying leases for the country’s portion of the giant shale formation that encompasses the Eagle Ford in Texas.

“They’re going to have all of the issues of depressed price that the people in the Eagle Ford are having now,” said Michael P. Darden, global chairman for oil and gas transactions at law firm Latham & Watkins LLP in Houston.

Mexican offshore assets have drawn interest from oil majors from Exxon Mobil Corp. to Royal Dutch Shell PLC as the end of the monopoly triggers a race to gain a foothold in the country. The question is how quickly producers will be willing to move into the higher-risk, more costly prospects.

With Mexican shale possibly having to wait, cheaper offerings in shallow waters might have to do for now.

“In response to the falling prices, the government is bidding out the most attractive, better margin projects first,” said James K. Alford, a partner focusing on Mexico energy reform for the law firm Locke Lord LLP in Washington.

While near-shore drilling may be profitable at current prices or even lower ones, pumping water, chemicals and sand into the ground to crack shale rock and release trapped hydrocarbons is a more costly business. So is drilling in ultradeep waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

“There are a lot of shale and deep-water opportunities available and those are all fairly capital-intensive projects that require significant exploration,” said Ivan Cima, head of Latin America upstream oil and gas research at Wood Mackenzie.

Even for the lower-cost offshore fields, the upheaval in the global oil industry doesn’t bode well for Mexico’s plans, said Marcelo Mereles, a former Pemex executive who’s now a partner at energy consultancy firm EnergeA.

Meanwhile, Mexico’s oil regulator earlier this month approved preliminary rules for the first round of bidding on 14 shallow-water oil blocks, a month later than previously scheduled. The contracts will be awarded in July, two months behind the schedule originally announced by the CNH, as the regulator is known.

“I don’t think we should be surprised if there is some months’ delay,” said Vanessa Quiroga, Credit Suisse equity analyst.

The Mexican government expects the first round of licenses to generate about $14 billion of investment as the country seeks to halt a decadelong output slide.

As for the Chicontepec formation holding more than 17 billion barrels of oil equivalent in northeast Mexico, its fate remains uncertain. The area’s complex geology requires technology such as fracking. And attempts to lure major producers to develop it failed last year.

Deputy Energy Minister Lourdes Melgar said bidding terms for Chicontepec may be changed in light of crude’s plunge since June.

Preliminary rules for shale and unconventional blocks available for auction are to be released in January, with the official bidding to open in March, according to the regulator’s original schedule.

There’s no question Mexico is offering an attactive new frontier for the global oil industry in the long term. Even the energy market rout may not deter the bigger investors, Latham & Watkins’ Darden said.

“The ability to access reserves in Mexico, that’s a very exciting opportunity,” Darden said. “It’s going to take a lot to dampen that, particularly for people who look at things in the long term.”

Oil majors including Exxon and Shell are carefully following developments related to deep-water Mexican prospects that likely will take years to unlock with offshore rigs, platforms and subsea production systems. The companies have looked to deepen their ties with Mexico’s state-owned Petróleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, in pursuit of partnerships and joint venture projects in the country.

“We’ve partnered with Pemex, in our downstream business, for two decades, and we welcome the opportunity to extend our 60-year history in Mexico into the future,” Shell spokeswoman Kelly op de Weegh said in an email.

No one is saying the investment decisions will be easy in the current environment and that the challenges for Mexico haven’t increased since its energy regulations overhaul started last year.

But a prolonged delay in bidding out the projects “would be a huge mistake,” said Ken Medlock, senior director of the Center for Energy Studies at Rice University’s Baker Institute in Houston. “You run the risk, quite frankly, that there could be other opportunities that could present themselves to firms with capital budgets.”